Proceeds in Orderly Fashion

At the end of three losses, and after six in seven games, playing from third place and a middle-of-the-order slump, the Dodgers would ride anything on Sunday afternoon that resembled competence.

So it was that when Jim Tracy awoke with a new lineup notion, and put a starter in the bullpen and another on the brink of the disabled list, then fell behind by a couple of runs to the Angels, the Dodgers held to the part of their game on which they were constructed.

On the kind of day at Dodger Stadium when the umpires sweat through their slacks, and a lady in a suite beside the press box blew lazy, soapy bubbles across the seats below, and fourth place was closer than second, the Dodgers fell in behind a semblance of their season’s intentions: starter to Brazoban to Jungle.

Derek Lowe threw strikes. Yhency Brazoban held the door. Eric Gagne huffed in. Starting with two on and none out in the sixth inning, the last 12 Angels came and went, sinkers to four-seamers to all that Gagne brings.

It was familiar and different and ultimately comforting in a clubhouse that had spent every bit of that 12-2 start.

“We’re trying to get going in the right direction here,” Lowe said. “You never know which one is going to get you going.”

It came to Lowe, for no other reason than it was his turn, a day after Brad Penny got almost no help at all, and in a period where the reliable parts of the rotation pretty much begin and end with the two of them. Lowe kept the Angels to two runs, the Dodgers scored six, everybody exhaled, then packed for a three-game series in San Francisco.

“Hopefully,” Tracy said, “this is a momentum builder.”

What he might have meant was a “momentum stopper,” because there had been plenty when Lowe arrived Sunday morning wearing a speckled T-shirt, shell necklace and beige cap with the picture of a beaver on the crown. If the season had reached that nervous little place where the standings suggested something was wrong, it was lost on Lowe, who is the only Dodger starter to have won a game since May 8, and he has won two in that time.

Forty minutes before he’d get the ball, he buckled his belt, pulled his cap down snug and turned to a few straggling reporters. “Good luck, boys!” he shouted cheerfully. “Have fun! Write well!” Dutifully, they wrote their stories a word at a time.

Earlier, he’d left the massage table to smother a writer with a hug, slathering him with a balm that left him smelling like a trainer’s hand towel.

It is what he does: About an hour before the biggest start of his life, last October at Yankee Stadium, Game 7 of the American League championship series, he sat in the visitors’ dugout and yukked it up with bat boys and whoever else wandered by. Then he pitched the Boston Red Sox into the World Series.

If you’re Tracy, and if you’re at all interested in the National League West, that’s not a bad guy to get around to every five days. As pitching coach Jim Colborn said, a wry smile crossing his face, “A minority of pitchers prepare that way.”

“I just try to make every day be another day,” Lowe said. “For me to come in here and try to be serious, put on what you call a game face, wouldn’t be me. I’d be faking it.

“If you can’t kid around with people an hour before you pitch, man, there’s still plenty of time to go.”

Over seven innings, through 79 pitches, Lowe flicked at the bottom edge of the strike zone against the Angels’ pushy hitters. As Vladimir Guerrero watched from the other dugout, his left arm folded into a sling, Lowe forced sinkers early, changeups late, and let the Angels have at it. He threw 14 balls, or 14 that the Angels watched, because the plan was to stay underneath the zone and let the Angels work for him. Of 21 outs, 13 were by ground ball or strikeout and only Juan Rivera, who homered in the second inning, hurt him by air.

“We thought we had a good idea of how to pitch them,” said Lowe, whose instinct is to throw strikes anyway.

Catcher Jason Phillips, Lowe said, called “a great game,” and he didn’t mention it, but Phillips also threw out a baserunner, his third in 30 tries. The rest was left to Lowe, whose four-year, $36-million contract has meant four wins, four losses and a 3.02 earned-run average in 10 starts, along with a pretty cool attitude. They’re all waiting on a return of the offense, and a third baseman, and now a couple of starters, and the last five weeks -- all in all -- have been pretty miserable.

They’ll take the good days, then, and assume there’s more out there like them, because the alternative would be enough to make even Derek Lowe glum.